Arrests and deaths

The death of Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) member Saad Samad Kiram in Cortes town a day after he was arrested by the Bohol police in Tubigon Thursday had me recalling my conversation with an elder when I was about to leave for Bohol in the late ‘80s. That was at the height of the insurgency in the country. “What’s the difference between the situation in Bohol and the one in Cebu?” I had asked him then.

“I don’t know what’s with that province,” he said. “Maybe it’s because the media there is not as big as the one in Cebu, but authorities there prefer to kill suspected insurgents rather than arrest them.”

It was an interesting view but one that tended to carry some truth in it. When a friend from Manila went to Bohol for the first time during that time, he complained about how small the capital Tagbilaran’s urban center was. Bohol is a largely rural island whose only city could be compared then to the Lapu-Lapu City of old. Urban growth was focused on Tagbilaran where everything else converged.

Media outlets were mostly based in the city. The signal of the few radio stations that operated then didn’t reach beyond Tagbilaran and its immediate environs. The two stable newspapers came out once or twice a week with very limited circulation. Perhaps the theory of my elder was true. There was little incentive to merely arrest violent enemies of the state.

Kiram was a remnant of the heavily armed Abus that entered Inabanga town a few weeks ago aboard three pumpboats. A count by the police and military pegged their number at ten or eleven. Three of them died in the first clash in Inabanga with elements of the Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 and the Central Command (Centcom). Another clash with government troops in Clarin town left four more dead. With Kiram’s demise, only two of them have remained at large.

Kiram was arrested after he surfaced in Barangay Tan-awan, which is not that far from Inabanga, hungry and tired. A peasant family fed him when he asked for food but the household also informerd the military about his presence. He didn’t resist arrest, apparently resigned to his fate. That he still tried to escape while in detention is therefore an interesting claim by the police.

The circumstances surrounding his death, according to reports that were obviously based on the police version of the story, also had me recalling my early days as a media practitioner. I was a neophyte reporter with The Freeman and looked up to older reporters like Hermes, who was with the police beat. One night, he asked the then editor-in-chief Juanito Jabat to assign a photographer with him because he was covering a major story the next day.

“This is one instance where we know something would happen before it will occur,” he joked then.

I could not recall now the name of the victim or the crime he committed but when he was transported by the arresting policemen from the police station to the city jail at dawn, he “grabbed” a gun from the police escort and jumped from the vehicle. He did not go far because his “pursuers” caught up with him and shot him in a “firefight.” And Hermes and the photographer were conveniently there to cover the incident.